An increasing number of data security threats exist in the modern computerized society. These threats may include viruses or other malware that attacks the local computer of the end user, or sophisticated cyber attacks to gather data and other information from the cloud or server based infrastructure. This server based infrastructure includes real and virtual computing devices that are used to provide a variety of services to user computing systems, such as data storage, cloud processing, web sites and services, amongst other possible services. To protect applications and services, various antivirus, encryption, and firewall implementations may be used across an array of operating systems, such as Linux and Microsoft Windows.
A firewall is a software or hardware-based network security system that controls the incoming and outgoing network traffic based on applied rule set. For example, a firewall may be implemented in a computing system to prevent incoming connections from possibly harmful computing systems. Further, encryption is the process of encoding messages or information in such a way that only authorized parties may read or understand the saved material. Thus, if users attempt to store sensitive information, such as social security information, encryption may be used as a failsafe to prevent unwanted parties from understanding the information even if the stored data is accessible.
In addition to the protective measures discussed above, segregation methods have also been pursued to limit the interaction between systems and applications. These segregation methods include whole system virtualization, which includes a full operating system and one or more applications, as well as application containers that are used to reduce dependencies on other cooperating applications. However, separating the applications into different virtual machines or application containers can add complexity to the security configurations for each of the executing applications.